And the Winner Is…

Mark Sarvas is the next to weigh in on this year’s Tournament of Books, deciding between Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. He spends much of the review lamenting the early loss of Robert Bolano’s The Savage Detectives (as Garth did here), but he’s able to momentarily put his chagrin aside to judge the two novels at hand. Since I haven’t read any of these three books, I can’t agree or disagree with Sarvas’ assessment. I was most interested, though, in the commentary by Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner. Guilfole wonders if Sarvas’ description of Vida’s novel as “effective if slight” is really praise at all. He goes on to say:To be fair to Mark, I’m now going well beyond what I think is either his conscious or even subconscious intention, but the “slight” business in this case strikes me as vaguely sexist as well, as though a book about a young woman literally searching for her identity, no matter how skillfully it is rendered, could live up to the grand (at least judging by physical size) ambitions of either Bolano’s or Johnson’s opuses.Guilfoile admits he might be reading too much into Sarvas’ commentary because he loved Vida’s novel so much, bit it did get me wondering: Was Sarvas correct in advancing Denis Johnson’s novel because it is, in his words, the “Big Literary Book”?There’s also some interesting commentary, mainly by John Warner, about how Sarvas, with the publication of his debut book, Harry, Revised, is “about to make the complicated transition from critic to novelist.” A sticky (and exhilarating) situation to be in, for sure.